Pro-Football-Reference

Are states proportionally represented on the historical list of National Football League players? That’s the question I had four years ago when I posted two simple state-by-state maps summarizing players’ birth places.

That post has been surprisingly popular, so I decided to remix the visualization a bit — replacing the old choropleth maps with tile grids.

Earlier today, Kansas City Chiefs kicker Ryan Succop missed a 27-yard field goal in the first quarter against the Cleveland Browns, prompting the announcer to say something to the effect of, “You don’t see many field goals missed from that distance.”

That’s true.

This histogram shows the nearly 500 field goals missed in the first quarter since the 2000 season. The misses are aggregated by distance, and, as you can see, the average miss length is about 42 yards. Only 16 missed field goals were shorter during that period. Sorry, Ryan: